Alfred Loedding

Alfred C. Loedding was an American aeronautics engineer. He was born on February 17, 1906 and died on October 10, 1963.

A 1930 graduate of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics, Loedding worked with the pioneering Bellanca Aircraft Company until 1938, when he became a civilian engineer for the U.S. Air Force at Wright Field, later Wright-Patterson Air Base. One of his specialties was low-aspect design aircraft, such as flying wings or flying disk designs, including a 1948 patent registered with the U.S. Patent Office.

In the summer of 1947, hundreds of unidentified flying object reports earned considerable mainstream publicity, and were taken seriously by the U.S. military. Due to his expertise in low-aspect aircraft design—similar to the "flying disk" or "flying saucer" shape of many reported UFOs—Loedding became the focus of early informal Air Force UFO reports, serving as liaison between The Pentagon and Air Force officers Howard M. McCoy and William R. Clingerman.

From 1948 to 1949, Loedding was a member of Project Sign, the formal UFO investigative arm of the Air Force. Loedding investigated many UFO reports and interviewed witnesses; Michael D. Swords described Loedding as part of "probably the most talented group to work on UFOs until the air force ended its investigation in 1969."